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  • Hacker News
  • It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....
    by charlie0
  • Or the Reptilians. Or nazis from the centre of the Earth.
    by rbanffy
  • Great first line for a story.
    by andrewstuart
  • It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.
    by visarga
  • Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.

    Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

    by statictype
  • the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.
    by weaksauce
  • Yes, but an alternative would be that if an organism is perfectly fit for its static environment (that hasn't changed in 5 million years) then there is no benefit to evolving novel features.

    More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.

    by sockaddr
  • That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
    by quuxplusone
  • Isn't this the opening to a few of those "virus destroys humanity" movies?
    by DannyBee
  • > Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.

    So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.

    by cyberax
  • Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.
    by dyauspitr
  • For some reason, I feel sad. I was always fascinated when finding an article about newly found discoveries on Earth, and the comments from Hacker News were usually helpful and adding more to the stories.

    Now, we talk about whether such discovery was written by LLM.

    Does it really matter?

    by sntran
  • > this was not an ordinary cave. It was something far rarer

    so probably a cheap openai model

    by franze
  • Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...
    by pokpokpok
  • Pangram isn’t a reliable detector
    by croes
  • An updated Turing Test is overdue or has someone suggested one?
    by vixen99
  • Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.
    by phyzome
  • while looking at the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave), this popped up from 2015 from bbc earth: https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.c...
    by john_strinlai
  • The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."
    by gregoriol
  • Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
    by wpollock
  • "Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
    by bcraven
  • Mentioning the recent Chernobyl accident is weird too. Surely an accident from long ago that is expected to be detectable is far more helpful.

    All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.

    by lostlogin
  • Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.

    There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (

      One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
    ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )
    by defrost
  • Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.
    by broken-kebab
  • "summary, a, b, c, why it matters" + fillers

    like the summarization tools based on those models except it's the opposite, it was fluffed up into a long article

    by yaemiko
  • Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me.

    Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.

    by springtimesun
  • I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.
    by RamblingCTO